A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to take a VIP tour of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. We saw a lot of interesting work in 3D graphics, Artificial Intelligence and virtual worlds, but the research that struck us most (being the psychology nerds that we are) was the the work on Human Multi-Modal Behavior Understanding. I know, its a mouthful, but the presentation by research scientist Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency simply blew us away. What Dr. Morency and the team at ICT are working on is using technology to do something that we should all be doing more of ourselves: Listening. With cameras and microphones they are developing a listening system that is more or less reading people’s minds. Many of you will be familiar with previous research which has shown that a person’s body language, facial expressions, gestures and voice can give us an incredibly accurate impression of what they are thinking and feeling in a given moment. This research has even spawned television shows like the popular “Lie to Me” on Fox. The show’s main character, Cal Lightman (played daftly by Tim Roth) is a master listener, able to read the thoughts and emotions of people, effectively reading their minds.
How does ICT do it? Well its still in the developmental stages but basically they set up a camera and microphone and listen for various indicators such as facial expression, gesture, body postion, vocal pitch and tempo and other factors. Their program will then interpret all of this data and deliver a breakdown of the subject’s state of mind in real time. The main purpose of this development is to make their “virtual humans” more intelligent and realistic. One of their characters for examples is Bill Ford, a virtual human designed to speak and empathize with veteran soldiers, aiding them to find the right kind of help they may need for PTSD and other post-war veterans’ issues.
What was our first question? “What about using it for poker or sales and marketing?” But here is the funny thing. Nothing that the computer is doing is something that we can’t do ourselves. In effect its just listening for indicators. Something we are more than capable of doing. The only issue is that most of the time we are too focussed on how we must be looking to the other person instead of remaining focussed on them. Nonetheless its an incredibly fascinating tool and we look forward to staying in touch with USC’s ICT.
What do you think about this kind of listening software? How can you imagine it effecting the world we live in? Keeping people honest? Invasion of Privacy? Share your thoughts here and/or on our Facebook page. And a special thanks to Hanna Dershowitz for inviting us on the tour.
